Born in Chicago in 1967, he is the son of noted Lithuanian geometric abstractionist Kazys Varnelis [1917-] and grandson of Kazys Varnelis, the Samogitian folk artist [1867-1945]. When his family moved to the Berkshires, he encountered Fluxus, meeting George Maciunas and getting to know the movement through noted Fluxus collector Jean Brown who became close friends with his mother.

He received his Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University in 1994, where he completed his dissertation on the role of the spectacle in the production of form and persona in the architecture of the 1970s.

In 2004, he was awarded a year-long appointment as senior researcher at the Annenberg Center for Communications at the University of Southern California where he examined the impact of telecommunications and digital technology on urbanism and architecture and directed a team of thirteen scholars looking at how new and maturing networking technologies are reconfiguring the ways by which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us. The result was the book Networked Publics.

He has lectured internationally at schools such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA, TU-Delft, the IUAV and at venues such as the Frieze Art Fair in London, Transmediale in Berlin, the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, the Architectural League, the Van Alen Institute, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Open Society Fund, and the Glass House.

He has published in journals such as A+U, Praxis, Log, Perspecta, Volume, Cabinet and has served on the boards of numerous scholarly journals such as Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Kulturos Barai. He served as media review editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

As former President of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, he received the Educator of the Year Award from the Los Angeles Institute of the American Institute of Architects. He was a member of the National Board of DOCOMOMO-US from 2004 to 2012.

Kazys’s research focuses on contemporary architecture, late modernism, architecture and capitalism, and the impact of recent changes in telecommunications and demographics on the contemporary city.